This chapter explores the legacy of the patriarchal family structures that were central to Brazilian slavery by exploring the stories of two filhos de criação who brought paternity suits against their natal families in early twentieth-century Brazil. Each was born to an enslaved mother and raised in his alleged white father’s household at the end of the nineteenth century. Their experiences offer rare insight into the internal dynamics of a particular extended family structure that emerged from plantation slavery, in which lower-status filhos de criação were raised to occupy a variety of differentiated social positions within hierarchical extended families. These children seldom moved into the class status of their “legitimate” relatives but instead often maintained life-long, unequal relationships that combined different measures of love, affection, dependence, servitude, and resentment. Their stories reveal continuing uncertainty over how to define and enforce paternal responsibility and family membership in the aftermath of slavery.

Slave songs – understood here as songs, dances, movements, and genres developed by the enslaved – profoundly marked the history of conflict and cultural dialogue in slave and post-slavery societies across the Americas. This chapter investigates belle époque slave song performance by focusing on two Black musicians, Eduardo das Neves (1874–1919) and Bert Williams (1874–1922). Their stories demonstrate that the musical field occupied a fundamental space within the politics of Afro-descendant representation, exclusion, and incorporation (real or imagined). Representations of Black people and the meanings attributed to their music could shore up the racial inequalities that reproduced themselves after the end of slavery, but they could also subversively amplify Black struggles for equality and cultural recognition.

This chapter explores the legacy of the patriarchal family structures that were central to Brazilian slavery by exploring the stories of two filhos de criação who brought paternity suits against their natal families in early twentieth-century Brazil. Each was born to an enslaved mother and raised in his alleged white father’s household at the end of the nineteenth century. Their experiences offer rare insight into the internal dynamics of a particular extended family structure that emerged from plantation slavery, in which lower-status filhos de criação were raised to occupy a variety of differentiated social positions within hierarchical extended families. These children seldom moved into the class status of their “legitimate” relatives but instead often maintained life-long, unequal relationships that combined different measures of love, affection, dependence, servitude, and resentment. Their stories reveal continuing uncertainty over how to define and enforce paternal responsibility and family membership in the aftermath of slavery.

Slave songs – understood here as songs, dances, movements, and genres developed by the enslaved – profoundly marked the history of conflict and cultural dialogue in slave and post-slavery societies across the Americas. This chapter investigates belle époque slave song performance by focusing on two Black musicians, Eduardo das Neves (1874–1919) and Bert Williams (1874–1922). Their stories demonstrate that the musical field occupied a fundamental space within the politics of Afro-descendant representation, exclusion, and incorporation (real or imagined). Representations of Black people and the meanings attributed to their music could shore up the racial inequalities that reproduced themselves after the end of slavery, but they could also subversively amplify Black struggles for equality and cultural recognition.

This chapter examines probate inventories and other primary documents to chart the integration of Bahia’s dendê economy within the post-abolition transitions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It reconstructs four socioecological processes fundamental in that synthesis: the expansion of dendê cultures and landscapes in and around nineteenth-century Salvador; the interactive emergence of transatlantic economies, landscapes, and religions on the bay island of Itaparica; the persistent proliferation of dendê landscapes despite official disregard and illegibility; and the complementary intensification of dendê and cacao production on the post-abolition Southern Coast. This chapter demonstrates how networks of people, plants, places, and power interacted across time and space to assemble and reproduce a transatlantic dendê economy combining nourishment, ecology, and spirituality.